Knocked Up

Last Sunday, in her report on stand-up comics at the Edinburgh Fringe, my Observer colleague Stephanie Merritt wrote none too enthusiastically about one show 'that you can take elderly relatives to see in absolute confidence', which is 'proving very popular with the grey pound'. Well, if there's one recent film that isn't after the grey pound (or dollar, peso, yen, euro, kopek or whatever), it's Judd Apatow's comedy Knocked up, which pushes the envelope of the mentionable as vigorously as did the Farrelly brothers nine years ago with There's Something About Mary, in the year of the Starr report, Viagra and the Lewinsky affair.

Some wielders of the grey pound may think the title refers to the old mill town practice of waking factory workers at dawn by a man tapping on their bedroom windows with a long stick. Its meaning, however, is much blunter. It refers to what happens to Alison, an attractive young TV presenter (Katherine Heigl), when she goes to a Los Angeles club to celebrate her new job as an interviewer on entertainment channel E, gets drunk with an unprepossessing Canadian illegal immigrant, Ben (Seth Rogen), and goes to bed with him. She accidentally misleads him into believing he doesn't need to bother with the condom he's struggling to put on.

Attempting to exceed his last film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow has set out to do for sacred cows what Buffalo Bill did for the North American bison and there are jokes about everything from the physical condition of Stephen Hawking to the problems of having sex during pregnancy. The director's wife, Leslie Mann, playing the second female lead, is given an angry speech delivered to a black bouncer at a club, in which she uses the word 'fuck' a dozen times in less than a minute.

Speaking as 'an elderly relative', I happily admit I thought the film continuously funny, though only intermittently inventive. I also found it astonishingly conventional in its social attitudes, which grey pounders will recognise as those of any Doris Day comedy of the Fifties and Sixties. It's an old jeroboam of a picture from which new champagne bubbles. The professionally ambitious Alison and the unemployed slacker Ben are the ultimate odd couple, both likable though unsuited in every way.

But she soon takes to the idea of motherhood and he rapidly develops a sense of parental responsibility. He even gets down on one knee to propose marriage, although handing her an empty ring box. Some of the best laughs are derived from the evasive language of executives at the heroine's TV channel and have no scatological underpinnings.